Compassion for the wretched is thin on the ground among European countries alarmed that fleeing migrants will flood their borders.

TRAPANI, SICILY—A shrieking baby, clasped like a ragdoll in the crook of an elbow. Panicked women hurled overboard into choppy waters, smashing against rocks. Men clinging for dear life from a ratline affixed to the stern of a foundering boat.

These distressing images were broadcast on national TV here last weekend, when a smuggler’s ship, its steering mechanism apparently malfunctioning, heaved in the waves off the Lampedusa coast and dumped most of its miserable human cargo into the sea.

Italian government officials claim the coast guard rescued upwards of 400 illegal migrants. They were the lucky ones, dramatically plucked from the Mediterranean, because this ship cracked up close to land and many were able to swim or wade ashore. It was also one of the rare occasions when news cameras captured the actual arrival on Italy’s coast of refugee claimants who’ve braved the narrow crossing from Libya and Tunisia aboard rickety vessels.

But compassion for the wretched is thin on the ground, both among Italy’s citizenry and European countries alarmed that the illegal backwash will flood their own borders.

Scores of ships have come and gone over the past four months, depositing an estimated 35,000 illegal immigrants on the small islands of Lampedusa and Linosa, off the Sicilian coast — two specks of land 113 kilometres from Tunisia and the most southern point of Italian territory.

What the cameras didn’t record: A ship with a manifest of 600 that capsized en route in April, all its passengers presumed dead. At least seven other vessels have gone down since February.

And there was this, according to the handful of stragglers who lived to tell the tale: 72 migrants left to drift aimlessly for 16 days aboard a crippled ship, its pleas for help allegedly ignored by NATO and European craft — including a military helicopter that made contact and then disappeared. NATO has denied ever receiving a distress call. By the time the vessel limped back into a port near Misurata in late March, only 11 people were still alive, the rest dying from hunger and thirst.

“The Mediterranean cannot become the Wild West,’’ Laura Boldrini, spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said last week, as refugee rights advocates demanded an investigation. “Those who do not rescue people at sea cannot remain unpunished.’’

International maritime law compels all vessels, including military ships, to answer distress calls from nearby craft in trouble.

The civil war in Libya and the Arab Uprising across North Africa has spawned a human exodus and humanitarian crisis since the start of the year, with tens of thousands fleeing, seeking refugee asylum and paying up to $1,500 for passage. Many are third-country nationals from sub-Sahara Africa who’d been trapped in Libya and Tunisia. But several have also claimed soldiers forced them aboard ships leaving Tripoli.

Moammar Gadhafi, furious with Rome for participating in the NATO airborne assault against troops and infrastructure, has declared he would “take the war to Italy’’ by swamping the country with refugees, including — possibly — suspected terrorists. Foreign Minister Franco Frattini accused Gadhafi of launching a “vendetta’’ against Italy for backing the NATO campaign.

Italy is struggling to cope with the deluge, establishing a new refugee camp — “reception centre’’ they call it — on the edge of a civilian airport near Trapani, its blue tents and portable toilets erected by late last week, everything ready for the surge of expected occupants. On Lampedusa, migrants at improvised encampments now outnumber the island’s population of less than 5,000, with thousands more asylum claimants already evacuated to straining refugee centres elsewhere on the mainland.

As of this week, 10,371 migrants had been processed at a disused NATO base on Lampedusa. Last weekend alone, 1,885 refugees arrived aboard five boats.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi vowed to clear Lampedusa. Cunningly attempting to off-load some of the burden, Italian officials have granted temporary residency documents to thousands of migrants, papers that permit them to move freely within “all countries recognized by Italy,” and releasing the asylum seekers without any access to social welfare, food or housing.

Unimpeded movement — no border controls, no passports or visas required — is central to the European Union’s concept of European integration; one big open continent. Twenty-five EU members plus Switzerland, Norway and Iceland were signatories in 1995 to the Schengen Accord that abolished border checkpoints and other transit controls. Now, suddenly, they’ve had a re-think.

Faced with the illegal migrant deluge, France was the first nation to object, with guards halting the entry of a train carrying about 1,000 French-speaking Tunisians who tried to cross at the Italian border town of Ventimiglia. President Nicolas Sarkozy called for changes to the accord, allowing countries to suspend the open frontiers policy.

At a meeting of EU interior ministers in Brussels on Thursday, 15 of 28 voted in favour of reinstating controls, although they didn’t spell out amendments to the accord. A summit of EU government leaders to decide on proposals is scheduled for June 24.

During an EU confab last week, however, proposals for reducing illegal migration — and curbing crime — included creating border patrols to intensify surveillance at European frontiers and establishing pacts with North African countries to control the flow of immigration across the Mediterranean. Some countries, such as Italy, have already done this unilaterally, signing “mobility partnerships’’ over the past decade with Libya, financial incentives that encouraged Tripoli to seize and turn back refugee ships. A 2008 agreement with Libya — ditched since the rebel revolution erupted — reduced the numbers of illegal migrants arriving in Italy from 36,000 to 4,300 in 2010, according to government figures.

Germany, which accepted 350,000 refugees from among the 500,000 who fled during the Balkan Crisis of the 1990s, condemned any dismantling of the Schengen Accord yesterday. “We can’t jeopardize here and now what we have developed in decades for the benefit of all EU citizens,’’ said Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle. “The free movement of people is too valuable to be sacrificed by domestic considerations.’’

And Denmark jumped the gun Wednesday by re-imposing stringent checks on its borders with Germany and Sweden.

While temporary suspension of the accord, by agreement, was originally to be allowed only in cases of “grave threat to public order or internal security’’ — and in the past has been applied to stop football hooligans from entering a country for a match where outbreak of violence was feared — some countries are clearly hoping to isolate the illegal migrant influx within Italy. Curbing easy migration has also been seized upon by right-wing nationalist movements that threaten ruling governments and fragile political coalitions, as in Denmark.

Humanitarian agencies and refugee advocates are outraged, describing the proposed amendments as unnecessary and a gross overreaction. Bjarte Vandvik, secretary-general for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles — a network of NGOs — said the “crisis’’ had been blown out of proportion.

“People see black people in boats landing on a small island in Italy and it seems unmanageable, but this year has seen a 20-per-cent low in the number of asylum seekers,’’ he claimed.

The annual EU acceptance rate for asylum seekers averages at about 25 per cent of claimants. But critics insist the most recent migrants are economic refugees. Entering Italy were 10,300 from Libya, 24,000 from Tunisia.

It’s such a short distance from Libya and Tunisia to Italy, yet the journey is fraught with peril. Tens of thousands are clearly willing to risk their lives. According to the UNHCR, one-tenth of them have died this year trying.

Across the water, even at the mercy of human traffickers and unseaworthy vessels, a better life beckons.